They had lied. All of them. I didn’t understand it. They had pretended he was dead. Or said nothing at all. I didn’t understand. He had just attacked someone. Hessel. Maybe killed him. There. In the very next room. But Leonie had spoken so softly to him, this man, my mother’s brother. This man, Basil’s dad. This man, my uncle, who had just saved my mother’s life.

The last light was disappearing outside and the room was growing dark. Mum was curled tight into a ball, her eyes squeezed shut. I gripped her shoulder. ‘Mum,’ I whispered. I gave her shoulder a little shake. ‘Mum, are you okay?’ But she didn’t move, and without opening her eyes, a tear seeped out from under her lashes and slid down her face. I brushed it away with my fingertips.

New unfamiliar voices came from the kitchen. Two men and a woman. The crackle and tones of police radios. I heard them giving an all-clear to an ambulance crew, and Leonie saying over the top of it all, ‘He has a brain injury, just so you know,’ and for a moment I thought she meant Hessel. ‘He’s not violent,’ she said. ‘Not usually violent.’

Another paramedic appeared at our window – a young man, blond, barely older than me – tapping softly on the glass. I left Mum and opened the latch, and the man heaved and the wood creaked and then with a splintering sound the stuck window finally opened.

A group of paramedics cleared the desk and the floor and helped Mum and me up and out of the window.

Flashing lights lit the night red and blue. Two ambulances were parked on the gravel patch next to the house. A police car sat idling with the windows dark and rolled up. And further along I saw Leonie’s car, and, in it, Leonie and Basil in a tight embrace, Basil’s shoulders heaving.

The blond paramedic led Mum away to one of the ambulances, and a kindly looking salt-and-pepper-haired older man took me gently by the arm. ‘You’ve had some pain I heard,’ he said to me. ‘Some bleeding? From a current pregnancy?’ Who were all these people? I felt so bewildered, but I nodded at him. What he was saying seemed true. ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Sit here tight with me. We’ll get a patient transport in for you.’ So I sat where he told me and watched as the doors on the back of Mum’s ambulance were shut and it drove quietly away.

On the way to the hospital in the back of the transport I couldn’t speak. The kindly man stayed with me. He patched the cut above my eye and didn’t try to make me talk. As we drove, the heavens opened and the clouds delivered their promised load, suddenly unimaginably loud on the metal roof of the vehicle, and then quickly gone, eerily quiet again, as if the clouds had thrown every drop they had at us, all in one go, and then found they had nothing left. And when the older paramedic handed me over to the staff at the hospital his voice was so low and gentle, like my dad’s, that tears began to seep out of my eyes. It had all been too much. It was all still too much.